OPINION

By Mike DeCourcy

updated 9:38 p.m. ET Dec. 21, 2007

Mike DeCourcy

When star Memphis forward Chris Douglas-Roberts threw a towel over his head and put his shooting shirt over top of that with still several minutes left to play in Tigers' road game at Cincinnati, he certainly looked warm. He did not look like he was having much fun, though.

Each time the Tigers play, the opponent comes in with another defensive plan designed to make the game slower, less entertaining, less fun. Southern California got it done with a triangle-and-2 gimmick zone. Cincinnati stayed close with a 1-2-2 zone and a clever sagging/switching man-to-man scheme that was hard for the Memphis players to recognize and even harder to solve.

The Tigers were pleased to get their first road win of the season, but they'll be happier to return home for Saturday's noon ET game — and perhaps more excited that the opposition is national championship contender Georgetown. The Hoyas wouldn't roll into FedEx Forum and set up shop in some sort of funky zone. Would they?

"I think they will go man and zone," Tigers coach John Calipari said. He expects the Hoyas to play some straight zone as well as man-to-man with center Roy Hibbert clogging the middle. "But I think they'll play with us up-and-down. So at least we've got a little bit of a chance."

The offense that was supposed to be so potent — and, in fact, was lighting it up through the first several weeks — has been held below 80 points in three consecutive games. Trojans coach Tim Floyd began the trend, and Middle Tennessee and Cincinnati followed by attempting to ugly up their games. All three lost, but the Trojans and Bearcats stuck around a long while.

Georgetown has no reason to question whether its personnel can match up with Memphis. The Hoyas are as deeply talented as any team in Division I. Both are among the five teams that entered the season as the most significant challengers for the 2008 NCAA championship. Those teams — including Kansas, North Carolina and UCLA — have a combined 47-1 record, so there's no reason yet to believe they will not occupy the same position by March.

This will be the only regular-season game, however, played between two members of that quintet. So it gains even greater importance, because if these five teams remain in the chase for No. 1 seeds as expected, whichever one wins between Georgetown and Memphis will have claimed the single best regular-season victory.

That makes it especially valuable to Georgetown, because it'll have earned that huge win on the road.

And it may be more essential to Memphis, which gets fewer opportunities to compete against the best because of its affiliation with Conference USA.

Save for subsequent home games against Arizona, Gonzaga and Tennessee and two matchups with improving Houston, the Tigers can expect a steady diet of inferior opponents trying to concoct ways to remain competitive. It's hard to press the Tigers, because that allows them to start running the break. It's hard to defend them with man-to-man, because their offense is predicated on driving the ball and guarding penetration is tough even for great teams.

So Calipari works his players against zones, encourages them to be more confident shooting the ball and tries to look at the bright side. "When they tell their teams they've got to hold the ball, shoot it late in the shot clock and 'Let's sag and not play people and hope they don't make shots' -- I like that because now I'm saying basically they're telling their teams, 'I don't think we can hang.' "

Mike Miller's college hoops blog Coach K, Roy both want shorter seasons

That sounds great, but it's hard to appear dashing against these defenses. Douglas-Roberts has scored only 19 points combined in the past three games on 7-of-21 shooting, and his comportment in the second half against Cincinnati looked like a coaching video illustrating "bad body language" among players.

"I keep saying, 'You have to have your motor running faster,' " Calipari said. "Watch Rip Hamilton. Watch how fast he runs off screens, how hard he cuts, breaks his guy down. You see veins in his head when he's playing. You can't go at a slower pace and get this done."

A slower pace is what most Memphis opponents want. When CDR isn't running, he sometimes finds himself on the bench, wrapped in a towel and a grimmace. That's not getting the Tigers anywhere.

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